Wednesday, September 10, 2008

US Gossip mag top of Canadian newsstands

Courtesy of D.B Scott (Magazines Canada blog):

Continuing a great service to the Canadian industry, Coast to Coast Newsstand Services has published its box score for the sales of Canadian and U.S. titles on Canadian newsstands, this time for 2007. Among the interesting developments were not only who was up and who down, but that the figures tend to shine a very different light on the recent Audit Bureau of Circulations data which gave a rather gloomy picture of the single copy business. Part of the reason was a change in ABC's methodology, removing "public place" and bulk copies from its counts.

Hello! magazine has taken the number one spot for newsstand sales among Canadian magazines and the number 12 spot over all. In 2007 it sold 1,747,987 copies for retail sales of $6.5 million. That's a jump of 313% in unit sales and 210% in dollars.

None of the top 10 and only three of the top 20 newsstand sellers are Canadian. When enquiring minds want to know why it's so hard for Canadian magazines to do well on their own newsstands, it's because we're crowded out by the likes of People (number one with a stagering 5.7 million units and $28 million in sales).

Canadian Living, the number two Canadian title is off 4.4% in units from last year, with just over $5 million in sales

Canadian House & Home was also off 4.3% in unit sales, with 2007 sales of $4.5 million

Style at Home was off 12.3% in unit sales and had sales of $3.2 million

Chatelaine was off 4.5% in unit sales with sales of $2.7 million

Maclean's was up 14.3% in unit sales, with sales of $2.4 million

Reader's Digest was off 8.1% in unit sales, with sales of $2.2 million